As part of our ongoing review of the present-day Barrambin site, I have previously undertaken three walks through the parklands: on 9 August 2022 (9-11am), 11 August 2022 (1-4pm), and 16 August 2022 (7-8pm). These are captured in the site’s gallery page. After the first three walks revealed interesting insights about the Victoria Park Parklands, I have undertaken a fourth walk on the afternoon of 7 October 2022 (12-2pm), framed around discovering the current use of the parklands; that walk is documented here.
From 1931 till 2021, Victoria Park was a golf course, which gradually came to encompass function venues and putt putt courses throughout its lifetime (Victoria Park, n.d.). With the announcement of the new Victoria Park Vision in 2021, the main golf course was closed, leaving only the driving range, putt putt and function spaces. The now-vacated lands became City Council parklands once again, and were opened to public use.
Since then, residents and operators have come to frequent Victoria Park with many of the recreational and horticultural activities one might associate with a public parkland. I have seen much of this activity myself during two of my past visits, as well as the current one. Dogs and their owners are ever present, walking and engaging in leisurely play; indeed a wellness trail has been marked, looping around Victoria Park with signage to guide walkers (to be investigated in a subsequent post). The parkland operators are also permanent fixtures here, conducting maintenance activities such as the irrigation of grass with sprinklers and the administering of fertiliser.
But more interesting than what is always here, there is what’s not, or not always, here. As I walk, it becomes palpable that the land is a text of past, present and future—found in the deliberate, persisting marks left by the parklands’ designers and sculptors, and in the transient evidence revealed by the environment and its populace.
There are efforts to commemorate Victoria Park’s history: one map refers to the southeast chain of waterholes as York’s Hollow, in reference to Barrambin’s nickname among European settlers. A sculpture of a serpent held aloft by boys found in one of these waterholes—signifying the Turrbal and Yugara Dreamtime (Moore, 2020)—alludes to the millennia of First Nations knowledge and history that live here.
Other things gesture to the future. The Parkland Operations building is dressed in City Council banners which announce the ongoing redesign of the parklands—aspirations for the future of this space. The heavy machinery and industrial chemicals that will enact this reshaping are stowed inside those fences, out of bounds to the public (although I do venture inside, before being turned away by an operator). Within ten metres of the Parkland Operations, a book swap by Street Library Australia (Street Library Australia, 2021) tangibly captures the human traffic that is not presently visible (I make a note to reinvestigate it at a later date).
The land dances with the passage of seasons. The narrow rivulets along the Inner City Bypass, which ran dry and crusted with dry earth on 9 August, were swollen by rain just a week later. Now, as the weather warms up through the first weeks of spring in October, jacaranda trees come into bloom, and picnickers are seen relaxing under them, while skateboarders ride the sloping paths on the western reach of the park.
There is a noticeable increase in activity among bird residents in this warmer month, too: Pacific black ducks and masked lapwings forage on the grass in large numbers.
Amid these gradual changes, the land is also in a process of artificial, accelerated revision(ing): what were barren sand pits of the golf course in August (and in the slightly outdated satellite imagery on Google Maps) have been patched over with strips of carpet grass and beds of flowers. What was previously a fenced patch of bare earth, newly planted, has matured and gone into bloom in October. And within the City Council’s documentation of the Victoria Park Vision, we can see (though limitedly) into the future: photorealistic visualisations and infographics introduce us to a future imaginary that will soon be enacted through the authority of the City Council.
At times, we see forces run against each other. On August 11, a pile of organic manure fertiliser was seen atop the southern slopes of the parklands, near the water tower, presumably to supplement the “revegetative” plantings nearby. Now, in October, the surface of the pond not twenty metres from that site is coated in a bloom of duckweed, and no ducks can be seen upon the water. The pond itself is not natural by any measure: aerial photography from 1946 (Brisbane City Council, 2020b) indicates it was not there at the time, and must have been added afterwards.
Duckweed blooms can signal an environmental degradation process known as eutrophication (Schindler & Vallentyne, 2008). Was the potential eutrophication of the water the result of efforts to revegetate the land? How the land and water respond to alterations in the biochemical balance is revealed by the passage of time, and it has been a mere two months.
The parklands seem to live in the overlap of historical and aspirational layers: what was here last year is often no longer here now, and what is here now may not be here in a year; what we do now will shape what the parkland becomes a month from now. This place is always moving through time, and more than that, time is place: a forward progression that has become increasingly legible across my repeated visits, intersected with the memory captured in photography and satellite images. Of course, the pitfall of such photography—as well as mine—is that it “fixes transience” (Baetens et al., 2010), freezing time into static points, as pins on a map freeze a journey into a series of coordinates. By visiting and revisiting, I see that this place requires time, and that it extends in both spatial and temporal directions (Graham, 2009; Malpas, 2012). Narrative flows through these points, and maps out the sense of space and time from this punctuated data.
Here, I try to tell the story of Barrambin in my time, albeit merely a tiny slice of time, which is itself extrapolated from four visits. I can only begin to wonder how Barrambin has, and will, change on much larger time scales.
References
Baetens, J., Streitberger, A., & Gelder, H. van. (2010). Time and Photography. Universitaire Pers Leuven.
Brisbane City Council. (2020a). Victoria Park Vision. https://brisbanedevelopment.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Victoria-Park-Draft-Vision.pdf
Brisbane City Council. (2020b, January 28). Aerial imagery—1946. ArcGIS. https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?useExisting=1&layers=8df0a022b7df4192849fdc72ed93bf12
Graham, M. (2009). Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology. Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 71–78. https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.590560058861546
Malpas, J. (2012). Putting Space in Place: Philosophical Topography and Relational Geography. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(2), 226–242. https://doi.org/10.1068/d20810
Moore, T. (2020, December 13). “Really rich Indigenous history”: Victoria Park’s future to celebrate its past. Brisbane Times. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/really-rich-indigenous-history-victoria-park-s-future-to-celebrate-its-past-20201211-p56mue.html
Schindler, D. W., & Vallentyne, J. R. (2008). The Algal Bowl: Overfertilization of the World’s Freshwaters and Estuaries. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Algal-Bowl-Overfertilization-of-the-Worlds-Freshwaters-and-Estuaries/Schindler-Vallentyne/p/book/9781844076239
Street Library Australia. (2021, December 9). Victoria Park Book Swap. Street Library Australia. https://streetlibrary.org.au/library/victoria-park-book-swap/
Victoria Park. (n.d.). About Us. Victoria Park. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://victoriapark.com.au/our-story/